It is known in the field of crop harvesting equipment to employ harvesting headers to cut crops for various purposes, such as feeding a combine harvester or swathing crop material.
At the front of a combine or swather is the portion referred to as the header. A typical header is equipped with a cutter bar, and a conveyor deck or surface behind the cutter bar onto which cut crop material will fall, and a rear wall of the header which extends up from the rear of the crop catching surface. Typically a rotating reel with a plurality of bats disposed around a reel shaft and axis is used to sweep the standing crop towards the cutter bar as the header and attached harvesting machine is moved through the field. The reel bats also assist in ensuring that the cut crop falls into the conveyor system of the header once it has been cut. In the early 1930's the idea of using a fingered pick-up reel was conceived, and fingered reels are standard equipment on most header designs in use today.
The reel in a harvesting header is typically designed to be approximately the same width as the header. The reel shaft is mounted between two rotational mounts at either end thereof, with a power drive attached to rotate the reel shaft. There are then a plurality of reel bats with fingers or fingers therealong which are equally spaced about the reel shaft, held in position by a plurality of radially extending arms out from the shaft, or a round mounting at the ends of the shaft allowing for the holding of the ends of the reel bats in their positions spaced equally and away from the reel shaft. Rotation of the reel shaft results in the rotation of the reel bats and fingers through the crop in front of the header, drawing the crop material into the cutter bar and the remainder of the device.
A typical reel design includes 6 bats spaced equally around the circumference of the reel, each of which carries a row of fingers, such that reel bats are located at intervals of 60° around the reel. In prior art reels each bat sequentially engages and sweeps the crop towards the cutter bar as the reel rotates. The rotation rate of the reel is engineered such that the speed of movement of the tips of fingers closely matches the forward speed of the harvester, in order to optimize the sweeping effect of the fingers.
Harvesting headers now manufactured with fingers attached to the reel bats typically have the reel bats themselves rotatably mounted in relation to their attachment points, and include a cam mechanism that by selective or guided rotation of the reel bat during the rotation of the overall reel, allows the tips of the fingers to follow a more complex path, into, through and out of the crop material as the reel turns. The cams could be different shapes including circular or otherwise, dependent upon the path of travel that is desired to be created for the fingers. A couple of examples of prior art patents in the area of the use of cam mechanisms to orient or adjust the orientation of the fingers on reel bats during the rotation of a harvesting header reel are U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,005,858 and 5,768,870.
In prior art cam reel systems, the reel bats themselves are typically rotatably mounted at the distal ends of a plurality of radial arms extending from the reel shaft, or within rotatable mounts on a circular framework or ring attached in position around the reel shaft, such that when viewed from the side over in cross-section, during rotation of the reel shaft the reel bats themselves move in a circular bat path around the reel shaft, and the engagement of the reel bats with at least one cam results only in the rotation of the reel bat members within their rotational attachments such that the fingers extending from each reel that are rotated by the camming action while the reel bats themselves move in their circular bat path. It is believed that a cam reel for use in a harvesting header which actually allowed for the movement of the reel bat members towards and away from the reel shaft during rotation of the reel would be a novel approach allowing for a more customized and optionally more aggressive reel behavior which may be desirable in certain cases.
Some of the prior art cam reel systems which try to allow for a modest degree of adjustability of the cam path and the resultant camming behavior of the reel and operation accomplish this by allowing for interchangeable sections to be attached into or out of a particular cam track, or the cam itself can be removed and replaced with one of a different size or shape to redefine the cam path. It is contemplated that an alternate approach which allowed for the reorientation or adjustment of the cam path by allowing for the movement of the cam itself between a plurality of predefined working positions would provide for a necessary degree of customized behavior while simplifying significantly the implementation of this adjustable aspect of a cam reel.